Dear Diary, I'm In Love Read online

  Daisy nodded, but before she turned to leave, she said to Laverne, “By the way, I found out that Sid's mother went to school with my mom. Mrs. Feingelt's maiden name was Maureen O'Hanlon.”

  ____________________

  JON & LISA

  As Lisa Raines returned to chambers, she smiled absently at Keiko Nishimura, the court clerk. Keiko was a short, pleasant looking woman in her late thirties. She'd worked at the courthouse since the day she had graduated from Napua High School. And Lisa had depended heavily upon her during Lisa’s first months following her appointment as a Hawaii State judge.

  For her part, Keiko had nothing but admiration for Judge Raines. Her secret hope was that at least one of her two daughters would go to law school and accomplish a tenth as much as the lovely, enigmatic woman had.

  Just the previous night she had said to Hideyo, her husband, “I liked old Judge Tanaka, but it was a blessing when he retired. There were years and years of court cases piled up ahead of us, and we kept falling further and further behind. There was even talk of the State Supreme Court doing something about it. Then Judge Raines took his place. My, she must have worked sixteen-hour days there for a while, but today she had only one case and no backlog. I never thought I'd see the day when that would happen.”

  Lisa was thinking the same thing when she smiled at Keiko, but her viewpoint was somewhat different. There were still the routine reports to check, still petitions to read, hearings to be held, and more decisions by higher courts to examine, but the docket had been cleared of all old cases. The mountain she'd found waiting for her when she'd come to the Hawaiian island of Elima was now level ground. And Lisa was unhappy because of it.

  As she took off her robes and shook her hair loose, she looked at herself in the mirror. “What now, Lisa Raines?” she asked her reflection. “Now that you can't forget yourself in work, you're going to have to deal with yourself again. It's not a joyful prospect, is it?”

  Lisa had had many bouts of dealing with herself and didn't like to even think of doing so again. Born Lisa Joseph, on a small truck-farm outside of Spokane in Washington State, her first memory was one of dealing with herself. She was sitting on the floor in the front room of the farmhouse she remembered so well. She'd been engrossed in something, something she couldn't recall, and her mother—slim, tall, blonde and smelling of soapsuds—took her away for something she also couldn't recall.

  Lisa had become angry. How old had she been? Three? Four? But there were no tears. There weren't any then, and there had never been any since. She just turned her anger inward. Her face had frozen and she'd refused to budge, refused to talk. She must have thought, though she couldn't yet phrase it that way, “I'll punish you by punishing myself.” And she had. Whatever it was her mother had wanted her to do, she knew for sure she hadn't done it.

  It was some years later her half-sister, some five years older than Lisa, gave an explanation for the self-punishment. Angry, the blonde child who looked so much like Lisa's mother, had slapped Lisa because of some trifle. When Lisa retreated into herself and simply stared impassively at her attacker, Shirley had exclaimed in exasperation, “You damn little Indian. You don't even know how to cry.”

  School provided both the escape from her self-examination and many occasions for its recurrence. It was there she discovered how learning was the escape—though the expression of it brought both rewards from the unbelieving teachers, and harassment from envious students.

  The worst day at school was the day she overheard two teachers in the corridors talking about her. “Too bad she's part Indian,” one had said. “With that mind of hers, she could really become something if she'd been white. This way she'll end up with a drunken husband and a half-dozen snot-nosed kids.”

  The best day was in the middle of her junior year in high school when her Social Science teacher called her into his office to talk to her, after just one day in his class. The teacher was Jon Raines.

  ***

  Jon was fifty, and she was fifteen.

  No, Lisa didn't fall in love with Jon. And she didn't worship him. It was no high school crush. Jon simply became her whole life, ten minutes after she entered his office.

  But those ten minutes in the office had Lisa Joseph against the world, and the world most certainly included Jon Raines. What started the turmoil was Jon's first question to her after she sat down. “What do you intend to do with your life, Lisa?”

  Her face was expressionless. “I've never thought about it,” she answered.

  “Teachers talk to each other about their students,” he continued.

  (I know they do.) She barely nodded her head in acknowledgment.

  “And you've caused more talk than Bill Charlie.”

  (Great comparison!) Bill Charlie was an Indian senior who had brought a rifle to school and had held a teacher hostage. Jon Raines was coming into focus. Most teachers would never have mentioned Bill Charlie to an Indian student. Lisa began to inspect him more closely.

  He smiled. “But for a different reason. Are you aware of how different you are from the other students?”

  (I've known that since I started school. But why rub it in. Or is he talking about what I think he's talking about?) Her eyes narrowed ever so slightly. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you are the most intelligent student I have ever encountered. There isn't a subject being taught in this high school where you couldn't be the top student—if you want to be. You can pick and choose what you want to be, and I'd like to help you choose.”

  Jon stood up, raised his hands in a gesture which seemed to be holding her away. “I know you're part Nez Perce, and I know the Indians hate the white man's guts. And the Nez Perce, especially, have good reason for feeling the way they do. I'd like to make an independent truce with you, but I'm not about to push. If you want to be just a student in my class, I'll treat you fairly. Nothing more, nothing less. But if you want more. If you want me to open up the future for you, to show you how you can use those extraordinary talents you have, to become someone I'll be proud of and you'll be proud of, the door is open to you—anytime.”

  (Doors don't open up for Indians. But Indians don't have anything to lose. Maybe I'll knock—just once. Maybe.) “Thanks,” she said, getting up.

  The door opened at the first knock. Jon Raines expected much of her. Geography, History, Literature, Economics, Anthropology, Psychology, Science. It went on and on. She devoured the books he loaned her. And he demanded she do more than read, that she study and learn. There was no time for her to think about the speck in the universe called Lisa Joseph.

  All the time was spent looking, and exploring, and wondering and trying to understand more and more about the enormous universe stretching out in every direction away from the minute speck.

  ***

  She didn't hear any talk about Jon and her until her senior year, but she knew there must have been plenty of gossip going on long before she'd heard about it.

  There were no secrets between them. She told him what she'd heard, the day she heard it.

  He nodded. “I've heard the stories too, just this week, and so has the principal. He wants me to come around to see him. And I know why. It won't do me any good, or you either, if I tell him the truth. The minds of most people don't work that way. If I tell him I've not so much as brushed your hand since I've known you, he'll laugh in my face.”

  Jon smiled. “And I'm going to give him the satisfaction. I'm going to tell him about how you've grown this past year. I'm going to tell him how proud I am of you, and how proud I am of myself for what I've done. And before he gets through laughing, I'm going to walk out of his office and out of the school.”

  Lisa didn't cry. Indians don't cry. The universe started to crumble instead. For once, some of her emotion must have shown in her face.

  “No!” he said, catching her expression. “I'm walking out of the school, but not out of your life. I'm far too selfish. And I think I still have a lot to give you. I'll be
moving to Seattle. I know some important people at the University, and they want students like you. Apply for a scholarship, and you'll receive it along with financial help. There are all sorts of minority programs designed expressly for that purpose, and a lot of those scholarships just go begging. I'll be waiting there for you. And, in the meantime, I'll write.”

  Jon left on the Wednesday following. Two days later, the principal stopped Lisa in the hall and told her she was going to be the valedictorian of the graduating class. Amused at the announcement, Lisa smiled. Her smiles came more naturally and more frequently since she had met Jon. “No, I'm not,” she said. His lack of protest and his evident relief at her refusal amused Lisa even more.

  After the small, rural high school, the University of Washington seemed to be a megalopolis. While she missed the brown hills of home, she found something new and strange and delightful on the crowded, busy campus. She was no longer Lisa Joseph, the smart Indian. She was just Lisa, lost in the rainbow population of Japanese and blacks and Southeast Asians.

  In a matter of days, she began to realize the majority of students were harkening to the sound of a drummer far different from hers. They were going to be dentists, or engineers or architects, and that's what they thought of. And, more often than not, the coeds were already talking about marriage to a dentist, or engineer, or architect. But she and a few other students were caught up in the world of learning.

  She'd spent one entire morning simply walking down the long stacks in the college library, reaching out to touch a book now and then, taking one out occasionally and browsing. Maybe, she thought, this is what the preacher in the Gospel Hall church I went to with mother was really trying to describe when he talked about Heaven.

  And Jon beamed. He'd found a job in a University District bookstore, and lived in an apartment four blocks north of the campus. These became the boundary of Lisa's existence. From dorm, to bookstore, to class, to library, to Jon's apartment and back again. When one o'clock in the morning rolled around, Jon would yawn and insist on accompanying her to her dorm rather than letting her walk alone through the dark streets.

  The first quarter ended. She came up to Jon's apartment, flushed with pleasure, after finishing her last and most difficult examination. “How'd you do?” he asked.

  She laughed and said, “By my standards, I did very well.”

  Jon joined her laughter. “That's what I wanted to hear you say. So tonight we celebrate.”

  It was dinner out, the first time ever with Jon. Eating out usually meant a plate of something between her and an open book at the Chinese restaurant on University Way. But tonight was different. There were no books. Instead, there were attentive waiters, and food Jon insisted she pay attention to. She knew she was glowing because she caught the reflection in Jon's face. She wanted him to have wine with his meal, since she knew he enjoyed it. He refused because she was still too young to join him in some. Both were intoxicated without it.

  And that was the night she said “no” to Jon.

  They had been sitting in his front room reading aloud from Juvenal's essay on women. Lisa giggled when Jon insisted Juvenal must have had a domineering mother. Catching him looking at his watch, she said, “No!”

  “What do you mean, ‘no’?”

  “What I mean is I'm spending the night with you—in bed with you.”

  The protests went on until two, but the defenses finally collapsed.

  They did nothing that night but hold each other. Before she went to sleep, she heard him whisper in her ear. “I love you more than books, and indolence, and flattery, and the deceitful wine that cheats me into a favorable impression of myself.”

  She rubbed her nose on his chest, and asked sleepily, “Did you just make that up?”

  “No. That was James Branch Cabell. He wrote that in a story about an old man who recaptured his lost youth because of his love for a beautiful young girl. Remind me to bring you a copy of it from the bookstore.”

  ***

  Lisa found it hard to decide whether her undergraduate days were her happiest ones, or her days at law school, or perhaps the days when she was practicing law as a young attorney. But it wasn't hard to decide what made all those days happy. It was Jon.

  They laughed when she was mistaken for his daughter. They were unashamedly in love. They were unbelievably happy.

  The one shadow hovering on his horizon she had quickly discovered and dispelled. Jon was nearly impotent, and she made a game of it. And he joined in the game.

  As with almost all of the rest of their lives, they were completely open with each other about sex. Lisa found other ways to satisfy her urges when intercourse failed, and he was only too willing to cooperate. And they enjoyed the research into human sexuality his condition led them into.

  The books piled up. Havelock Ellis, Kraft-Ebbing, the Kama Sutra, as well as raunchy and hilarious novels about hookers and nymphomaniacs, were interlarded with Gibbon and Tolstoy and Darwin. The borrowed VCR and their first pornographic tape caused an uproar.

  “No one can bend that way,” Jon said in awe mixed with genuine disbelief, on viewing a particularly agile performance.

  When Lisa looked back at those days, she saw sex in the context of all the other learning flooding her consciousness in the years since she had walked into Jon Raines's office. It was satisfying, and for her was complete. And Jon told her how never, in his wildest dreams, had he imagined that that part of himself could have ever been so thoroughly fulfilled.

  The time for more decisions came in her senior year at the University. It was a year of weighing options, a year of making choices, and a year of planning.

  Jon had told her back in the first weeks of their friendship she was cursed with a plethora of alternatives. That was before she had become comfortable enough with him to admit her ignorance and inquire about a new word. But she'd rushed to the dictionary the moment she'd left his office.

  “An often undesirable and hampering superfluity.” The definition set her off on what Jon called her dictionary expeditions. One word would lead to another and then to another. She was as engrossed in the trip as the other girls in her class were by a tour of the clothes section in a Spokane department store.

  Never had she been more conscious of the plethora of alternatives than during the last year of undergraduate work. And, again, Jon consciously strove to guide without leading. “I'm playing Beatrice to your Dante. I can show you something of what Heaven has to offer, but I'm not about to make you go there.”

  And then a sudden early-winter rainstorm after a long dry spell became the catalyst for her decision. The dilapidated vehicles, driven by so many of the students, spilled oil and grease along the streets and alleys in the crowded collection of old houses now made up into tiny apartments just north of the campus. Steady rains washed the waste down into the sewers and out into the Sound. Dry weather built up the offal, and then a light shower could turn it into an efficient and dangerous lubricant, as it had on that day.

  Jon and Lisa had just left his apartment when two cars skidded on the film and collided directly in front of them. They left their names with the officer who arrived at the scene, and then forgot about the incident. When they were called as witnesses, Jon could see his companion absorbing the surroundings of the court with the same intensity with which she consumed the volumes they both brought to their apartment.

  That night he smiled at her enthusiasm and joined in it. “If it's going to be the law, you’re going to get the best education. And let's start right now to see that you do.” By the weekend her application was off to Harvard Law School.

  Three weeks later, when she stopped at the bookstore to eat lunch with Jon, his first words were, “I think they're impressed.”

  She looked a question.

  “I gave Harvard this business number, but I didn't really expect them to call, and certainly not as quickly. They want you to go back there for an interview. You're going to like Massachusetts.”

&n
bsp; ***

  After a week at Harvard, Lisa wondered how she could have thought of the University of Washington as being cosmopolitan. The mix of colors, of nationalities, of languages and races in Cambridge made her head spin. She and Jon had found a miniscule apartment near Central Square. Students, living in the area for a brief period in their lives, brushed shoulders daily with ghetto residents who had been born there and would die there.

  Both Jon and Lisa liked the neighborhood despite its blight. They would have preferred to have been closer to Harvard Square, itself, but the extra rental costs would have cut down on the precious books they could buy. As it was, they were still within walking distance of the Yard on nice days, and only one stop away on the subway on bad ones. They decided Jon wouldn't try to find work. Instead, they would live on the small amount he had saved over the years.

  “And when I hang out my shingle,” Lisa said, “I'm the one who's going to support you, and no arguments.”

  “No arguments,” Jon said, amused at the intensity of her assertion.

  “And while I'm not getting any arguments,” she said, “I think it's time I made an honest man out of you.”

  The wedding ceremony was brief. They kissed and exchanged rings. And both of them wondered why they felt nothing had changed. “Maybe it's because nothing has,” Lisa said, thoughtfully.

  Jon smiled. “We've just discovered lilies don't need to be gilded.”

  Their days were spent at Widener Library, at the law library, in class, browsing through the bookstores along Massachusetts Avenue, walking along the Charles, drinking cappuccino in the coffeehouses. And Lisa absorbed law like a squeezed sponge released under water.

  What surprised Jon almost as much as it did Lisa was the ease with which they were accepted by others in this milieu. Age, race—nothing mattered except the ability to contribute intelligently to the seemingly endless flow of conversation. Jon was still the outgoing one, but Lisa was coming along fast.